


What Humans Ought to Be

by Lyus



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-24 11:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16174565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyus/pseuds/Lyus
Summary: My heart doesn't feel as though it's in my chest. I place my fingers over my pulse and wonder when I'll feel something.I find it when looking at Hypatia.





	1. Hypatia

You get no more than a step before she is on you. Your fingers curl around the edges of a filing cabinet that's a few pounds from crushing the fluttering heart between your ribs. You imagine the convex shape of ribs piercing lungs, the suffocating feeling of drowning in blood, and a loss of consciousness. Alas, you are alive and your mind is alight with dramatics. 

 

You are only vaguely aware that the creature wearing Alexandria’s skin has devoured the man whose hand you held moments prior. There is a moment where you pause in his memory before you are gone, slinging yourself into the rafters and down the bloodfly infested halls as Alexandria howls your name. You can follow directions well enough to make an already half-concocted cure. You only hesitate in it's administration, your fingers curled around the dusty wooden beam you perch on, your eyes and ears focused on the rattlings of what used to be Alexandria Hypatia. 

 

In the end you make her herself. You tell her of the poison that clouded her mind but not your conclusions, of the blood on her hands, of the way she seems to be in even less control of her limbs. She has a beast trapped between the snare of fingers over her eyes and a mind too sharp to ignore the obvious. You lead her from the halls of her hospital in the shambling skin of a captain.

 

You think nothing of Hypatia again until you are forced to speak in the days leading up to the rescue of Sokolov, but you speak.

 

* * *

 

She grows on you. She is like the crust of barnacles on the hull of Meagan's boat, the plaque in the heart of the rich men in Dunwall, and the way blood so rarely coats your blade. You gravitate toward Hypatia only when she isn't looking, when she is too occupied with her formulas and her desire to help that she does not see you in her peripheral, poised to break the barrier you know you have imagined.

 

* * *

 

She holds your hand as though you would save her, but you would sooner condemn her. You see the influence of your aunt written in the lines below Hypatia’s tired eyes and you know she knows why you've avoided her. You'd said little even when you were spoken to, in these months after she has lingered with her fingers prying open the cage that is your ribs. You find it in yourself to loose her hand from yours and apologize.

 

It's not enough, because she is gone one day back to Karnaca. She left you a note in the form of an audiograph and the impulse to vomit that it induced, the memory of the last time you'd heard your father's voice, that inconsequential recording tucked into the folded pages of your journal. You are struck down like Icarus. Your wings have melted and the crown lays heavy in your fingers. The only thing left to you is the ring your mother wore and her mother's before her and the weight of your own inadequacy.


	2. Kaldwin

You find her leaning against the rail of the upper deck with hand outstretched over the railing. She plays with her sword as though it's an impossibility that she might drop it. You barely contain your gasp as she lets it play across her fingers. It is, for a moment, suspended in the open air and separate from the forces of gravity and the convulsions of the boat beneath it.

 

The white of Emily's knuckles alerts you that she has noticed you. There's a twitch of her wrist that you know should open the sword, change it's position in her hand leading into a thrust, but it doesn't and you are left dumb standing behind her without words in your throat.

 

* * *

 

She hears the footsteps before registering that it's a person that she knows and  _ isn't _ a threat. She's existed in this state of terrorism for so long that normal occurrences have become warped in her mind. 

 

She imagines this is how her father felt when she was snatched from him and he watched as the life bled from her mother's eyes. Her mother tried to teach her so much. She couldn't have prepared her daughter for this.

 

* * *

  
  


“I could not— would not— drop it even if I thought that I were capable of letting go.” She's speaking of things that escape you, but you guess the death of her mother, the imprisonment of her father, the loss of her youth and childhood in the machinations of a political machine headed by those that would see her sooner dead than deaf and controllable. She'd grown past the age of usefulness of anyone with political aspirations, save for her aunt.

 

She reminds you for a moment of the glimpses of things you see in your sleep. She's above you, but it's  _ wrong _ ; Her expression, her body language, the swaying grey and brown background that you know is caused only by your refusal to acknowledge your dreams as something half-remembered. You remember the feeling of Emily above something that was not you, but it excites you in a sickening way the same as the traces of violence you find on her body and in her behavior. She's no more your empress here than she was when she held your life in her hands, shut behind open eyes . She's only as human as you let her be.

 

There are no words you can share that would indicate your understanding so you grasp her hand with a strength you convince yourself you don't have. She looks at you like she learned to rule a world before a country, with the eyes of someone who has seen more than should exist in a reasonable world, but you aren't cowed. You've both convinced yourselves of something. You know it when she slides her hand from yours. 


	3. What Does Billie Lurk Matter?

You're third party to all the tension on your vessel but still your main priority is controlling your own fear and the safety of Sokolov. Kaldwin is a force. You knew she was the daughter of Corvo, heir to an empire, and had seen things unfit for the eyes of a child, but you were never a good judge of how events would shape an individual. 

 

Even then she's as emotionally constipated as any noble you've met.

 

* * *

 

Kaldwin makes her presence known through locked doors becoming open, through the methodical completion of tasks that are not her own without comment, and the way she finds you but speaks only in her own time. You imagine her as yourself without mistakes, with a focus on something that's  _ more _ than justice that might be owed, but you know she houses anger that could end your life. You like her more than you ought even having seen the black of her eyes.

 

If she weren't marked, if she didn't sing to you in the way the child of a mother murdered should not, would you like her still? Would you ignore the pressure of her eyes flaying your skin from the darkest corners of your ship if it meant losing her attention?

 

* * *

 

“I wish I could take it back.” You’re the reason, part of the reason, her mother is dead. 

 

“You don't get to do this knowing I might die.” And you didn't, but you had. You'd deserved the rippling of the flesh in her shoulders, the dragging air of her sword unfurling. When you open your eye Emily stands there heaving, containing whatever demons lay under her skin to give you one more chance too many. She is a hunched black mass against waves and polluted sky when you see her last, even if you hear from her again much later.

 

“Fifteen years you’ve lived wishing you could take it back and fifteen years I’ve lived missing my mother, but after all of this, getting to live isn't enough for you?”

 

She says it as though your continued existence is a mercy she owes you. She says it like oblivion isn't what you deserve. She says it like there's a conflict stopping her from raising her sword to your throat in a way that spoke of nothing personal. You continue to exist. She continues to seethe.

 

* * *

 

In another world she killed you and held you in her arms until you drowned in the depth of her eyes. It's a comfort she didn't owe you, a mercy she didn't owe you, a waste of the patience that still clung to her despite all her trials. You wake just as you've woken before: whole, missing the sum of an arm and a hand and an eye, but breathing and your mind as clear as the limited sleep you got and the hard drink packed into your stomach with dark breads would allow. You visit Hypatia and think that had she been given the opportunity to turn her restless energy towards a subject that was worthy of her attention that she wouldn't be so awkward, that if either of you had gotten the opportunity to be better together that you might be able to do more than exist. It’s wishful thinking and your life has been too hard to hope.

 

Words sit oddly on the tongue of Alexandria who expects her teeth to be sharper than they are, who hunches in on herself to appear less threatening (impossible for a woman of her height and her build, especially given what she is). She's all the trappings of a killer wrapped under the skin of a woman afraid to be assuming of anything again, but she's the company Meagan-Who-Is-Billie keeps. You ask her of her correspondence with the Empress but mention nothing of your own because what would the point be? You're both killer and admirer, you and Hypatia. There are things you are simply not meant to have.

 

You ignore the golden tint of Hypatia’s eyes just as much as she ignores the smell of alcohol that's lodged itself into your skin beyond a good scrubbings ability to get out. In these moments you're Meagan-With-Eyes-That-Take-Note-But-Don't-See and Alex pretends there is no duality in her concern for you or for Emily Kaldwin. Fortunate for her to only have a handful of identities to your uncountable figures.


	4. This is How She Matters

There are worse things than killing your mother, but it's the one thing you can't let go.

 

* * *

 

Is the single quantifying thing that makes up Daud the fact he killed your mother? What of the other things he's done, the other blood that's stained his blade? They're justifiable in the face of having lost the only thing in your life as important to you as Corvo, of having had your mouth covered and your self silenced in an attic room for so many days to have been warped into what you are now.

 

You are the result of other people's actions. You are the result of Billie Lurk’s participation in the murder of your mother and you're shamed for having not seen something as obvious as this. A moment 15 years ago so ingrained in your brain but you couldn't have seen this coming, seen her involvement, seen the tightening of her fist when you were too close in the darkness? Maybe the difference is that Billie-Was-Meagan and they shared a face. You thought you had  _ seen _ her. You thought you had seen a threat for what it was when the press spread their accusations, but it was just a layer of something your eyes weren't sharp enough to pick apart. As it is you're more betrayed by a woman in a red coat than the man that slit your mother's throat and you wish you could kill her for who she was and not who she is now.

 

You trusted her. You listened to the beating of your mother’s heart and her whispered words.  _ I can see why you like her _ . 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I ever get around to it there will be a sequel to this. Probably.


End file.
